19th century Italy sent so deep and sustained reverberations. And this Germany of Swinburne's is curiously remote, it is the Germany of Tacitus and Grimm's fairy tales, and the motley crowd of princedoms and dukeries:

I am she beside whose forest-hidden fountains

Slept freedom armed,

By the magic born to music in my mountains,
Heart-chained and charmed.

By those days the very dream whereof delivers
My soul from wrong;

By the sounds that make of all my ringing rivers
None knows what song;

By the many tribes and names of my division
One from another;

By the single eye of sun-compelling vision
Hear us, O mother!

In sharp contrast with the vague and uncertain touch of that portrait is the terrific sureness and trenchancy of his Italy and his France. Swinburne felt deeply the spell of France; he gloried in her genius which had shown Europe the way to Revolution; he gloried in her as the birthplace of his master, Hugo; but he saw her also prostituted to sensuality, and submitting tamely to the yoke of the Second Empire ; and he turned upon her with the fierce yet agonized rebuke of a lover to a guilty mistress. But when the fiery trial of 1870 came upon her, his anger changed to pity, and he felt that she who had beyond others loved humanity, had, like the Magdalen, atoned for her sins. It is Magdalen, thus guilty and thus redeemed, that Freedom, the spirit of God and man, addresses her :-

Am I not he that hath made thee and begotten thee,

I, God, the spirit of man?

Wherefore now these eighteen years hast thou forgotten me,
From whom thy life began?

Yet I know thee turning back now to behold me,

To bow thee and make thee bare,

Not for sin's sake but penitence, by my feet to hold me,

And wipe them with thy hair.

And sweet ointment of thy grief thou hast brought thy master,
And set before thy lord,

From a box of flawed and broken alabaster,

Thy broken spirit, poured.

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And love-offerings, tears and perfumes, hast thou given me,

To reach my feet, and touch;

Therefore thy sins, which are many, are forgiven thee,

Because thou hast loved much.

From George Meredith, too, the tragic overthrow of France, no less than the desperate fight for Italian unity, elicited noble poetry, poetry as much more pregnant and weighty in intellectual substance than Swinburne's, as its music is less eloquent and winged. The ode December, 1870" stands, with the greatest of Wordsworth's War sonnets, at the head of the political poetry of the century. Like Swinburne he feels the mingling of glorious gifts and foulness in the French genius. But for him too the glory is the supreme thing: it was she who led the way in the liberation of mankind :—

O she, that made the brave appeal
For manhood when our time was dark,
And from our fetters drove the spark
Which was as lightning to reveal
New seasons, with the swifter play
Of pulses, and benigner day;
She that divinely shook the dead
From living man; that stretched ahead
Her resolute forefinger straight,

And marched towards the gloomy gate

Of Earth's Untried. . . .

But now this prophet and leader among nations is plunged in ruin, half through her own sins: she who in

The good name of Humanity

Called forth the daring vision! she,
She likewise half corrupt of sin,
Angel and wanton! can it be?
Her star has foundered in eclipse,
The shriek of madness on her lips :

Shreds of her, and no more, we see.

There is horrible convulsion, smothered din,

As of one who in a grave-cloth struggles to be free.

Yet amid the chaos she is full of song :

Look down where deep in blood and mire,

Black thunder plants his feet, and ploughs
The soil for ruin; that is France:
Still thrilling like a lyre.

And these words, written forty-five years ago, are yet more moving to-day, in the midst of a struggle less outwardly disastrous but far more deadly for France, and which she did far less to provoke.

How, lastly, does this international poetry of the end of the century, of Swinburne and Meredith, differ from that of Byron and Shelley, near the beginning? Partly, as we have seen, in that it is both vaster in range and more penetrating in degree of insight into the personality of nations. But even more, because it goes along with a passionate love of, and imaginative understanding for, England herself. Byron and Shelley have no note of joy in England; but Meredith and Swinburne are as firmly rooted in her soil as Shakespeare and Wordsworth; where in modern poetry is the wonder of this "enchanted isle" made more alive than in the one poet's pictures of her woodlands and breathing valleys, her Hampshire maids and farmers, or in the other poet's pictures of the North Sea surging against the embattled crags and castles of Northumberland?

And there is meaning in this latter-day union of what we commonly call national and international idealism. It means, as I have said, that the love of country itself has been lifted to a higher plane. So long, let me repeat, as national greatness is conceived in terms of power, or of territory, or even of wealth, the very conception of a community of nations can hardly emerge: other nations are rivals to be beaten, are material to be made use of, are territory to be annexed, or at best, are allies to rally to our help; their individual aims, interests, aspirations, count only as pieces, more or less formidable, in the game of the opposite side or in our own. So far and so long as these conditions prevail, nationalism and internationalism are inconsistent and incompatible: the one can exist only at the expense of the other. But the root fact of the situation, and the ground of the deepest encouragement is this, that in proportion as the aims of a nation cease to be fundamentally material, as soon as it seeks a wellbeing founded upon the spiritual enlightenment, the mental and moral health of its population, the similar aims of other nations become contributory, instead of rival forces, their advance an element of its own progress; all these multiform national lives becoming figures in the complex pattern of the life of Humanity; and the love of each man for his country, as Mazzini said, only the most definite expression of his love for all the nations of the world. The problem of converting

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:

that old intense but narrow love which finds complete expression in a fighting patriotism into this not less intense love of country which is only the most definite expression" of a love which goes beyond country,―this problem is one with that of transforming the brute-will to master man into the spiritual will to uplift him and therefore all who are working for the spiritual uplifting of their fellow-countrymen are working for humanity, and all who are working for humanity are working for their own land. And if there is something higher than patriotism, as Edith Cavell said with the clear vision of martyrdom, in her last recorded words, so the recognition and fulfilment of that something higher is itself an act of patriotism; and she herself will be remembered not only as one who loved England, and died for it, but as one who loved England too intensely and too nobly to hate any of her fellow-men.

TH

BAGHDAD AND AFTER.

BY DR. ALPHONSE MINGANA.

HE fall of Baghdad has elicited so much comment in the press of the country, and is an event of such immeasurable importance, that it may not be out of place in these pages to offer some remarks by way of explanation of certain aspects of its significance.

The city is said to contain within its precincts some 100,000 to 130,000 inhabitants. These figures, which have been adopted by the Times (12th March, 1917), are far below the limits of truth; the inaccuracy, however, must not be attributed to the Times, but to the imperfect Turkish census. Those aware of the utter deficiency of the Turkish survey of population would add at least one-third to the total given in official registers, whilst at the same time we must not overlook the fact that in Mesopotamia the male population alone is registered. A woman, and especially a married woman, is a haram, a sacred thing, and no one is allowed to call her by her name except a husband, a father, a brother, or a near relative, since a wife does not adopt her husband's name on marriage. It follows, therefore, that a great secrecy surrounds her Muslim name. In the census of 1911-1912, which immediately followed the so-called Constitution, the inhabitants of Mosul were given as 95,000, those of Baghdad as the double of this number, or approximately 192,000, and those of Basrah less than the half of those of Mosul, i.e. 43,000. After making every allowance for uncertainties under this heading, I should be tempted to give 130,000 to Mosul, from 200,000 to 230,000 to Baghdad, and some 40,000 to 50,000 to Basrah. These three localities are the three main cities of actual Mesopotamia. Basrah and its dependencies represent the old Chaldæan hegemony, Baghdad the Babylonian Empire, and Mosul the old Nineveh, which was the centre of the Assyrian Empire. Taken together, these cities form a complete and inseparable whole, so far as language, manners, and customs are concerned. It is inconceivable, therefore, that one power should hold under its